Masterless Men in a Masterful Land: Judith Wright’s Generation of Men

Abstract

Judith Wright in Generation of Men reconstructs her past generations and their resilient struggle to master the alien landscape with all its traumas, pain and struggle in order to transform it to a 'place'. This paper tries to locate Wright's passionate attempt in this book to see the unique landscape of Australia as linked inextricably to the erosion, endurance and struggles of the mindscape of humanity, and to see how the landscape inheres the alterities of the spatial/cultural binarism. In this landscape a Protean mystery dies with the death of the black aboriginals but is once more reborn in the poet's mnemonic homage. The paper tries to establish Wright as being above the category of a mere environmentalist, and argues for her poetics as a humanist celebration of Australia as a landscape of cornucopia as well as a problematization of the spatial dimensions of oppression and denial unacknowledged in a history of national reconciliation.